Autodesk and the Future of Sustainable Design

Joel Makower

If
you start with the premise that many of the solutions to our global
sustainability challenges require smart design and systems thinking, it
doesn’t take long before you find your way to Autodesk
(ADSK). The 29-year-old
design software company has made a series of impressive moves into the
sustainability realm over the past few years. It’s one of those largely
unheralded companies creating the tools used by architects, designers,
manufacturers, and — most recently — cleantech entrepreneurs to produce
the next generation of greener, cleaner, more efficient products.

Over the past year or so, I've had the opportunity to meet with or
interview several members of Autodesk's sustainability team as well as
its CEO, Carl Bass, on a number of occasions. Along the way, I have
become increasingly impressed with how the company hasn’t merely
expanded its offerings to help design professionals achieve
sustainability goals, but has also set out to elevate the
sustainability knowledge and capabilities of design students and
professionals, from high schoolers to seasoned engineers.

Autodesk makes a suite of 2D and 3D design software tools commonly
known as CAD, for computer-aided design. Its flagship product, AutoCAD,
along with the more advanced tools that integrate with AutoCAD, is the
standard design software in architecture, engineering, and construction
firms; manufacturing environments, such as industrial machinery, tool
and die, automotive, and consumer products; and media and entertainment
companies. (Autodesk software has been used in the special effects of dozens of movies, from “Alice in Wonderland” to
“X-Men.”)

Starting a few years ago, as green building grew from the margins to
the mainstream, Autodesk began integrating components to help
architects, engineers, and designers perform “whole building” analysis,
optimize energy efficiency, even aim for carbon neutrality. It
developed Building Information Modeling, or BIM, software, which allows
architects, engineers, construction professionals, facility managers,
and owners to break down barriers and bridge communication between
design and construction teams, with the goal of optimizing buildings
and creating predictable outcomes. Autodesk began using its own
facilities as a living laboratory
to gain real-world experience. “The idea is to use our own operations
as a testing ground for prototyping new products, new features, new
workflows that would serve our customers and rapidly green, in this
case, existing buildings,” Emma Stewart, senior program lead for the
Autodesk Sustainability Initiative, told me.

No Green Button. Those efforts created a gateway
into sustainability for Autodesk that has spread beyond buildings to
designing everything from products to cities.

Sarah Krasley, a product manager in Autodesk’s Manufacturing
Industry Group, works with the company’s industrial customers to help
embed sustainability. “We have customers in building products,” she
explains. “We have customers who are designing apparel. We have
customers that are designing consumer packaged goods. The myriad of
sustainable design objectives across those industries is vast, and we
realize that there is no green button. That is, there’s not one simple
sustainability tool that you can put into a CAD system and solve
everybody’s problems. So we’re doing a lot of exploration at where
sustainable design comes up in the workflow, and where it’s most
meaningful.”

One outcome of that exploration was a partnership announced last fall
with Granta Design, a developer of materials databases, that combines
Autodesk's Digital Prototyping technology with Granta's materials
information technology to enable industrial designers, mechanical
engineers, and others to more easily create products through
sustainable design.

At the other end of the spectrum is a partnership with CDP Cities,
a project of the Carbon Disclosure Project, which has worked to
standardize carbon reporting and risk management. Now CDP is working to
do the same with municipalities, from Beijing to New York. Autodesk partnered with CDP
to standardize the software platform for how cities are tracking,
managing, and reducing their carbon risk over the next 40 years,
explains Stewart. “So all of a sudden, Mayor Bloomberg and his team are
able to look out at New York City and understand the resource flows of
energy, waste, water in a way they’ve never done before, and map that
against the way sea level will rise over the next 40 years, and then
make financial decisions accordingly.”

Class Acts. The city-level partnership exemplifies
one of the things I find most interesting about Autodesk: It invests in
educating the marketplace, seeding future customers with free or
low-cost versions of its software. This isn’t unique to the
sustainability space, but sustainability may be where it’s needed most.
To limit sustainable design to the relatively small population of
engineers, designers, and architects who already “get it” misses a vast
opportunity for both the company and the planet.

Autodesk has more than 1.5 million students in its Education
Community,
which allows students, both undergrads and grads, to download and
test-drive free software and other tools. The idea is that students
learn their craft using Autodesk software and, of course, want to use
it in their professional lives, too.

Those students, it seems, hadn't been learning much about
sustainability in their studies. “The thing that kept coming up as we
made new software innovations is that there are a lot of people who are
not even familiar with the terminology around sustainable design, and
are not familiar with how to take these high-level concepts and break
them down into steps that are actionable,” Dawn Danby, Sustainable
Design Program Manager at Autodesk, explains. “If we’re going to start
building new solutions for doing all kinds of energy analysis or
materials analysis, people need to understand why this stuff matters
and have a context for it. We’re very aware that the hundreds of
thousands of mechanical engineers every year who are being released
into the marketplace are about to make very significant resource
decisions.”

In response, Danby and her team last year
launched the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop,
a series of free online instructional videos. They’re short, clever
works, produced by Free Range Graphics, the team that created Annie
Leonard’s wildly popular viral video, The Story of Stuff,
and its growing spinoff projects. Danby herself stars in the segment on
Whole Systems Design,
with sustainability education guru Jeremy Faludi leading most of the
others. It’s a terrific public service and a fun way to learn, even for
us non-designer types. (Autodesk also sponsored AskNature.org, a
free portal for architects, designers, and engineers on bio-inspired
design, produced by the Biomimicry Institute, on whose board I sit.)

Seeding the Market. And then there’s the company’s Clean Tech Partner Program,
which aims to pretty much give away suites of software — about $50,000
worth — to hundreds of cleantech start-ups. Entrepreneurs submit an
application, explain what they’re doing, and get a complete suite of
Autodesk software for a nominal fee. The program started two years ago
in the U.S., then spread to Europe and, most recently, to Japan. Again,
the idea is to seed these startups with Autodesk tools, with the hopes
that they’ll become paying customers as they grow.

“In the short term, [sustainability] is the most pressing problem we
face as a society, and I think it's important that we do things to help
solve the problem,” Autodesk CEO Carl Bass told me recently. “And I
think a lot of the innovation is going to come from small companies.”
Along the way, Bass has become a frequent speaker at cleantech
conferences and an articulate advocate for cleantech entrepreneurs.
(You can watch excerpts from an interview I did with Bass, below. I’ll
be interviewing him again, onstage at the Green:Net
2011 conference in San Francisco, on April 21.)

As I said, much of these activities remain unheralded in the wider
world of green business; Autodesk isn’t typically one of the companies
that springs to mind when people name sustainability leaders. In some
ways, that’s what I like most about Autodesk: a company that quietly is
building the foundation for a sustainable future, creating tools and
partnerships that are fundamentally changing the way things are
designed and built. We may never see buildings or products that boast
anything along the lines of “Autodesk Inside,” but in some respects,
our sustainable future could well be labeled exactly that.

For more than 20 years, Joel
Makower has been a well-respected voice on business, the environment,
and the bottom line. He has been called "The guru of green
business practices." This article was
first published on his blog, and is reprinted with permission.